Albert Einstein

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

Garrison Keillor

You start with what you know, but writing is a process of discovery. It's not as if we're simply taking a plate out of our heads and laying it down on paper and printing from it; we're not. Writing is an act of discovery. The moment you start--you start with a character, you start with maybe yourself or maybe somebody else, but you start with a character and you learn about that character by writing about that character and you wind up in places you never thought you were going to go when you started out. I mean that's the whole reason for writing. Discovery. You do not know what you yourself think until you put it into words.

--American Masters series on PBS, Garrison Keillor: The Man on the Radio in the Red Shoes

Barack Obama

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

Auguste Rodin

Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.

Benjamin Franklin

They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

In the days ahead, we must not consider it unpatriotic to raise certain basic questions about our national character. We must begin to ask, "Why are there 40 million poor people in a nation overflowing with such unbelievable affluence? Why has our nation placed itself in the position of being God's military agent on earth...? Why have we substituted the arrogant undertaking of policing the whole world for the high task of putting our own house in order?

Eddie Cantor

Slow down and enjoy life. It's not only the scenery you miss by going too fast--you also miss the sense of where you are going and why.

Samuel Johnson

What we hope ever to do with ease we must learn first to do with diligence.

Maureen Dowd

The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for.

St. Francis de Sales

Have patience with all things, but chiefly have patience with yourself. Do not lose courage in considering your own imperfections but instantly set about remedying them--every day begin the task anew.

Gore Vidal

Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.

A. A. Attanasio

Silence is an easy text to misread.

Andy Warhol

They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.

Francis Beaumont

Let us have a care not to disclose our hearts to those who shut up theirs against us.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense.